The design time between product cycles is becoming increasingly compressed. As such, hardware designers have less time to thoroughly test designs to work out bugs and characterize design performance. To aggravate this design verification quandary, as new high-speed, ultra-precise technologies are developed, often test equipment does not exist that is capable of adequately or vigorously testing a design. In fact, a designer may find himself in a scenario where his prototype is faster and more precise than the test equipment at his disposal to verify operation of the prototype.
The demands of compressed product cycles may dictate that a hardware designer is not afforded the luxury of waiting while sufficiently fast, sensitive, and precise test equipment is developed. In response, hardware designers have developed self-test methodologies to aid the design verification process. One such methodology is built in self-test (“BIST”). BIST is a circuit design technique in which physical elements of a circuit are devoted to testing the circuit itself to identify various design and/or manufacturing flaws. Similarly, input/output BIST (“IBIST”) is a design technique for testing input/output (“I/O”) circuitry. BIST and IBIST afford the designer the opportunity to integrate test components into his design that are capable of vigorously stress testing a prototype.